Beckside Lights (Unabridged‪)‬

John Ackworth was the pen name of the Rev. Frederick R. Smith, a Methodist minister who was born in Snaith, Yorkshire, but spent much of his career as a circuit preacher in Lancashire. Beckside Lights is the sequel to his popular collection of stories Clog Shop Chronicles. Set in the fictional village of Beckside , the book consists of 12 tales of everyday life in a close-knit Methodist community, which continue with a third volume, Doxy Dent . Based on an entertaining group of Methodist who gather around Jabez Clegg's clog shop fire, the stories are sentimental at times, but Ackworth has a nice sense of irony and refrains from proselytizing. Ackworth was also a student of the Lancashire dialect and the spoken passages in his books are mostly written in a phonetic version of late 19th-century Bolton speech, which I have done my best to reproduce.